A Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing
The Secrets Behind Marketing’s Biggest Buzz Word
Overview
To really understand content marketing it’s important you first understand the difference between marketing and advertising:
- Marketing involves all communications distributed by a company, organization, or government with the intention to further its objectives and mission statement.
- Advertising, a sub-discipline of marketing, is the promotion of advertisements which feature a specific call-to-action — each ad being judged by the percentage of viewers who follow this call to action.
In short, advertising is a very small piece of the overall ‘marketing’ pie.
The second thing you need to understand is the difference between traditional marketing and content marketing:
In the world of traditional marketing, advertisements are the centerpiece of everything. The goal is to create and re-create ads for different mediums to maximize your return on investment. Implementing Traditional Marketing, the war for markets is based on getting the most eyes on your ads and the most eyes to follow your call-to- action.
And then everything changed.
In the world of content marketing, a much more “macro approach” is taken and the call-to-action of a single advertisement is simply a tiny blip on the radar of a true content marketing campaign.
“Eyes aren’t what matters, consistent engagement with your audience is.”
Content Marketing is the distribution of quality content that is diverse and useful to your target audience and includes but is not limited to:
- Videos
- GIFs
- Social Media Sponsored Content
- Graphics
- PPC Campaigns
- Blog Posts
- Google Search
- Google Display Network
- Infographics
- Whitepapers
- Tutorials
- Case studies
“The “content” in content marketing is anything that can help inform your audience about the problems your company solves and when appropriate, the approach your company takes to solving these problems for your audience.”
Why does Content Marketing Always Win?
You don’t need a fortune to successfully employ content marketing, you just need some great content authors on your team. It’s no longer about who can spend more on Google AdWords, it’s about who can master content marketing. That is undoubtedly the future, and in some cases present, of marketing.
To successfully embark on a content marketing approach, you can’t look at content as “a la carte”, you need the whole menu and you need it regularly. This plethora of content showcases your product or service, the problem it aims to solve, how your product or service solves the problem, as well valuable information about the industry in which you operate, and last but not least — the intersection of all four.
I mentioned earlier that the goal of traditional marketing was to get viewers of advertisements to follow the call-to-action featured in their advertisements. Content marketing, however, aims to:
A) Get viewers to engage with your content
B) Convert those viewers into customers
C) Retain your customers.
Now let’s go piece-by-piece through the content marketing pie.
Video
Video content is unusually sparse and at times non-existent at most of the marketing departments of companies. Why? Typically because they have no content creators in-house who can consistently produce video content. To successfully engage in content marketing you need to consistently produce and distribute video content, something that just isn’t logistically or economically feasible if you depend on a third party video agency.
White Papers
These can be the totally worthless or drive sales by 1,000% if done correctly. I’ve seen companies churn out white paper after white paper and lose millions in the process. I’ve seen others churn out the same number of white papers, same format, same landing pages, same PPC ads, and make a fortune. So what gives?
Don’t hire traditional marketers to write your white papers because they’ll be completely focused on sales and why the reader should buy your product. That’s an advertisement in 5,000 words, not a white paper. Write white papers that help your audience and subtly imply how your company, and the industry in which your company operates, can solve those problems. Moving on.
GIFs
Don’t overuse these. Sometimes a short video is a better way to get the same message across. Sometimes a GIF is the better route like showing a very simple process or showcasing your product on a micro-scale. A successful GIF links to a more in depth piece of content so think of a GIF as an enhanced graphic that allows you to add more frames to an ordinarily single frame graphic, i.e. a better visual technology to get viewers to engage with your content.
Social Media
99% of business owners do not understand “social” which is why social media marketing companies have continued to sprout up and grow around the world. You’ll find top ten practices like post constantly, post on these days, use popular hashtags, news jacking, retweet others, etc. You can do all of those things mentioned above and fall flat on your face — yes, they are good practices, but without relevant and quality content you might as well not even try. Quality content comes from skilled content authors who know your product inside and out, believe in your product, and understand the problems your target customer faces. They then create content that helps your target customer without aggressive, vague, and generic sales copy. Simple.
Note: Don’t just write clever Tweets, employ a multimedia approach to social. Ok… Moving on…
Graphics
We as humans are an increasingly impatient species. If you read some of David Ogilvy’s books on marketing and followed his advice, you’d fall flat on your face in today’s marketing landscape. Why? Because although he was the father of modern advertising, he was dead far before the days of the world wide web. If he were alive today he’d tell you the more words, the better. That’s no longer the case.
Post something online without a graphic, and post the same thing online with a graphic and see what performs better. To take that further, A/B test different graphics. Case in point, I once posted the same article with two different graphics, everything else was the same. One got 2,000 views and 798 reads and the other got 43 views and 16 reads. Graphics are extremely important and can make or break the content hiding behind it.
“People like to say mobile first when referring to web design — I like to say graphic first when it comes to written content.”
PPC
This one needs its own case study. I once formed a company and was shocked to find our main competitor spent $50,000 per month on AdWords. We spent $0. I knew we had to get creative and before content marketing existed, I used it anyway and within six months we destroyed our competitor and put them out of business by employing content marketing and building a better product.
Running PPC Campaigns is like firing a machine gun into the dark unless you have quality content and an advertising professional writing the copy for your PPC ads and a skilled graphic designer creating your display ads. At the end of the day, these people are only responsible for getting people to view your content so make sure that:
A) They know what they’re doing
B) Your content is worth viewing.
Without those two crucial ingredients you might as well save your money.
Blogs
The general population of the world does not like bloggers. So how do you succeed with your blog? Don’t B.S. people to get more readership. You want your blog to trickle down into sales growth and retention so make sure your blog provides a diverse array of multimedia quality content from unique voices and then syndicate that content across what is called “rented space.” Still don’t get it? Feel free to ask any questions you’d like in the comments section below because the answer is not “one size fits all.”
Infographics
Remember my statement earlier about how we don’t really like to read? Enter the genius invention of Infographics — the meaning is in the name. Want to explain your business process or product or really anything with words? If you can use an infographic, go with that instead of just words.
Infographics are great because they are human readable and include all of the “best of” practices of making content readable. Text is broken up, headers are employed, graphics support everything, and with this fruit salad of delight, your infographic is way more likely to be consumed than your ten paragraph essay about how the transportation industry is being disrupted by companies like Uber and Lyft.
Tutorials
Most products aren’t easy to use and even if you think they are, they might not be for someone else. When I say tutorials I mean any content that teaches people how to do something. Your tutorial can be technical documentation, a video tutorial, a basic tutorial on HTML, or how to bake a cake. Remember how content marketing is supposed to help your target audience? Well, tutorials by definition help your target audience so whether they are product related, industry related, etc. they are an important part of the content marketing pie.
Case Studies
Tread lightly when it comes to these. Case studies tend to be self-gratification posing as being a contribution to the community. Make sure your case study gives credit where credit is due as it is likely that your company didn’t save the world alone. Also consider something I’ve coined a “micro-case-study” — which is what exactly? A case study is about how your company solved the problems of another company. A potential customer with the same problems as the company in the case study will see this and think, hmmm… maybe I should hire these guys. However, most people don’t read case studies. Why? Because they’re long blocks of text.
A micro-case-study hones in on one problem your company solved for a client. Example: “How AcmeCorp Made Document Sharing Easier for IntelliCorp.” Like everything, try and use a multimedia approach to case studies so if you can avoid your typical Opportunity, Challenge, Solution, and a graphic template and break it up into multimedia segments, videos, graphics, GIFs, infographics, micro case studies, etc. — then do it.
Conclusion
You may have noticed a pattern. Content Marketing involves a large pie and each of the headers above is a slice of that pie. There are more slices but not enough to fit into a single reading. Without the whole pie you’re not employing content marketing, you’re still in traditional marketing land. The most important pattern you might have missed is that people don’t really read so although the headers may imply tons of text, I strongly suggest you employ different types of media at every opportunity.
There are several obstacles to wrapping your mind about what content marketing actually is. These obstacles are presented to different players in the marketing sphere. The first comes from executive level management which is the time honored phrase, “Build it and they will come.” In this case, “it” is the content. Many people think that quality content and quality content alone will produce results — they won’t.
“Content marketing is two words and content is only one of them.”
-Jeff Bullas, leading expert on content marketing
Last but not least is the crucial ingredient to quality content — passion. You must believe in the company, product, or service in which you are tasked with creating content for or you are completely useless as is the content you create. Remember that your content is being consumed by human beings with feelings, emotions, desires, concerns, needs, etc. It’s your job to create content that placates their needs and touches their hearts. Never forget it.
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